Playwright · Dancer · Writer

Xinning Shao

To look, with sober care.

Xinning Shao
About

Xinning is a writer and dancer raised between China and Singapore. She will graduate from Yale College with a double major in Comparative Literature and Cognitive Science in May 2026.

She runs a column for the Singapore-based newspaper Lianhe Zaobao (联合早报) and is the winner of the Seoul Players' 2025 10-Minute Play Festival for directing. Her first play, A Play Named Zhuangzi, was produced by Yale Vermillion Theater in December 2024. She was a speaker at the Singapore Writers' Festival in 2023, and her work has been featured in the Singapore Poetry Anthology. She has worked with Stan Lai's Theatre Above in Shanghai and at the Huichang Theatre Festival (2025). A staged reading of her new play, My Dear Beloved, will be held at Crescent Theater in April 2026.

Playwriting · Theater

Playwriting

Embodying language

2024

A Play Named Zhuangzi

A philosophical romp through Daoism, featuring bromance, humor, and a ghost of an author.

Full lengthProducedYale Vermilion Theater
Synopsis

Dr. Shoelace and Zi You, characters trapped in the classic Daoist text Zhuangzi, are having a rough day. As Dr. Shoelace dutifully recites Zhuangzi’s teachings, following “the Way” begins to sound suspiciously like hopeless determinism. Thus begins Zi You’s quest to live up to her namesake: freedom. But first, a small problem: the Zhuangzi author sits right behind them, watching and writing.

In this meandering journey through the world of Zhuangzi, a philosophical romp plays out with humor, bromance, and a whole lot of ghost metaphors. Take this as “a day in the life of the Zhuangzi”, or a manual on what NOT to do if you wake up in Truman’s world. What if, one day, you could meet the author of your life — and what would you do, if they handed the pen of fate to you?

Produced by Yale Vermilion Theater, December 2024. Supported by Ezra Stiles College Creative & Performing Arts Award and the Asian American Cultural Center.

Photos: Jiaqi Ma

2025

Mid-flight · 半空

A father and daughter trapped in a 15-hour flight from home to the dreamland.

BilingualWuzhen Theater Festival
Synopsis

On a long-haul flight from Beijing to New York, a Chinese young woman runs into her father who wanted to surprise her by coming early to attend her upcoming wedding. Unknown to him, the wedding has just been canceled. Unknown to her, he is still grieving a recent loss. Habitually assuring each other that “everything is fine,” the two circle around the truths of their lives, testing and probing each other until the suspended flight cabin forces their unspoken fears out into the open. If one has chosen a life in the liminal time and space of transcontinental flights, where, then, is home?

一架从北京飞往纽约的航班上,漂泊海外的女儿决定取消与美国男友的订婚,却意外在机舱中遇见迫不及待来参加婚礼的父亲。长途飞行的半空成为跨越时空的对话空间。在有限的飞行时间内,两个被迫漂泊而无法降落的人,如何找到长久离散中失去的链接?

Bilingual production for the Wuzhen Theater Festival (China) 2025.
Directed by: Wisteria Deng
Performed by: Wisteria Deng, Meng Wang

Production photos

2021

Who Murdered Shakespeare

Hamlet kills Shakespeare. Now it's truly his turn to be, or not to be.

MandarinDevisedHangzhou
Synopsis

After another sold-out performance of Hamlet, Hamlet sneaks into Shakespeare’s bedroom and murders his author. Now ready to start his life afresh, free, self-made, Hamlet decides to become, in turn, a test-taker that helps others cheat, a businesswoman pressured into marriage, a poor student trapped in unrequited love, and a robot who doubts its own integrity…

“To be or not to be” — that still is the question.

Mandarin production following devised theatre workshops in Hangzhou, China, 2021.

Photos: YS Collective

2025

The Library of Forgetting

Hazel digs her way through the rubble of a collapsed school building, and an infinite library that holds all possible versions of life.

Full lengthIn development
Synopsis

After witnessing the collapse of a school gym, Hazel finds herself trapped in an infinite library that holds all possible versions of anyone’s life. Unlike the grieving parents searching for an explanation for their children’s senseless deaths, Hazel doesn’t understand why she is here. Time is ticking, though. Those who stay too long in the library risk becoming part of it. Guided by a grumpy, jaded librarian who drinks to forget, Hazel digs through the rubble of memory to find her way out.

In a policeman’s guilty confession, a father’s desperate attempt to cope, and three little girls’ quiet, relentless escape, Hazel begins to unearth her buried past and witness how the stories of her hometown have become her own. The Library of Forgetting is about making sense of life’s nonsensical twists, about how we remember as we let go, and the weight of the past we must carry, and eventually shed.

Initial draft completed 2025.

2026

My Dear Beloved

2041: AI lover bots are optimizing romance, but they've hit a snag: users no longer want sex with them.

ComedyStaged reading
Synopsis

It is the year 2041, the height of the Great Relationship Recession. Most people now live with personalized AI lover bots designed to meet every emotional and physical need. These lover bots are having a KPI compliance crisis, though: users no longer want sex with them.

Tasked to troubleshoot this issue, MILO (they/them), a corporate minion at a love-tech conglomerate, decides to extract data from human clients at True Love Consultancy — a modern-day Hinge service devoted to restoring the ancient tradition of real people dates. MILO starts following W and M, two humans both dissatisfied with their lover bots, in an effort to update lover bots in this battle for their human users’ heart.

Moving through fake dates, genuine fights, and how “proprietary neuro-affective prediction algorithm built on decades of psychological insight” may or may not help us love someone better, My Dear Beloved is a comedic thought experiment to stress-test what lies beneath our pursuit of love: do we want care? unconditional acceptance? the right amount of resistance? Is human relationship really irreplaceable — and if it is, how far are we willing to go just to have the “real” thing?

Online reading held in October, 2025.
Staged reading to be held in April, 2026 in Crescent Theater, supported by Ezra Stiles College Creative & Performing Arts Award.

Directing

2025 · Director

Something is Rotting on the Stage of Glenmark

A Hamlet production spirals into farce, when an overeager theater novice literally dies onstage and enters eternal belonging to the stage as the theater's resident ghost.

🏆 2nd Place — Seoul Players 202510-Minute Play Festival
Production Details

Written by Ken Preuss
Directed by Xinning Shao
Performed by Mark Dorman & Tylah Jarvis

Seoul Players 2025 10-Minute Play Festival · 2nd Place

Photos: Bret Lindquist

Dance · Choreography

Movement

Letting the body speak

2026 · Upcoming

The Way We Say Goodbye

A poetry dance film.

Upcoming in Yale Schwarzman Center’s Storyboard Exhibition, April 2026.

2025 · Dancer

Yale Dance Lab – Improvisation

Photos: Chris Randall

2021 · Choreographer

Flower

A celebration, a love song, a eulogy to the cyclical nature of literal and metaphorical “seasons.”

Style: hiphop, soul, tutting

Dancers: Dora, Himnish, Janus, Mia RV, Mia Tran, Will, Xinning

Music: flower (Johnny Simpson)

Choreographed and performed at Yale Off-Broadway Theatre, April 2021.

Photos: Alisia Pan

2022 · Co-choreographer

Instagram

A meditation on freedom and alienation living in a network of infinite connections.

Style: hiphop, contemporary, tutting

Dancers: Amara, Annelise, Irving, Maddalena, Sarah, Sophia, Xinning

Music: Instagram (DEAN)

Co-choreographed with Sophia Chen. Performed at Yale Off-Broadway Theatre, November 2022.

Photos: Neal Ma

Co-choreographer

C’est Pas Pour Toi

Co-choreographed with Vivian Xu

Dancers: Eesha, Jenny, Mia RV, Mia Tran, Sasha, Selina, Suzanna, Vivian, Xinning

Style: Jazz Funk

Music: Galipette — Lolo Zouäï

Writing · Translation

Writing

Savoring words

2021 – Present

Life Overseas Column

Column

Contributing personal essays bi-monthly to this running column for Singapore's leading Mandarin-language newspaper.

2024

Arrogantly in Love: Selected Works from Wang Xiaobo’s Letters to Li Yinhe

Translation

English translation of selected letters from the Chinese writer Wang Xiaobo to his wife, the sociologist Li Yinhe.

2024

Humanism on Tap: A Play

Play / Essay

Blending dramatic writing with literary criticism, this play stages a bar-stool conversation between two (reasonably drunk) literary theorists, Sylvia Wynter and Donna Haraway. By placing theoretical debate into everyday social spaces, the work tests what critical theory can do when it is forced to confront real, lived experiences.

2024

My Friend An Drew

Translation

English translation of Shuang Xuetao 双雪涛’s short story《我的朋友安德烈》.

In progress

Amber

Translation

English translation of Liao Yimei 廖一梅’s play 琥珀.

Let’s play!

Open to commissions, collaborations, conversations.